Good question! In a lot of instances there is actually a difference between “conventionally sheared sheep” and “humanely sheared sheep”. The wool industry is sometimes like the egg and dairy industry where wool-bearing sheep are factory farmed so to speak, and the wool is procured as a slaughterhouse product. There are instances where sheep are not simply shorn when their wool or fleece is long enough, but rather mutilated, overcrowded in pens, shipped en mass, and in some instance killed for their byproduct alone. I won’t go into the gruesome details, but given the delicate nature of sheep shearing, there is big difference in how the animals get handled, particularly in the large groups that move through the shearing pens.

I grew up on a small family dairy and sheep farm, and even with the care that we took in shearing our flock each season, it was difficult to keep some animals from being cut and severely knicked by very sharp shears.
Granted this is inevitable in some cases, but a large operation does not always tend to these cuts and the infections that result, and subsequently the animals are disposed of.

When a designer mentions that the use humanely-sheared wool – they really mean it!